MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "V" (PART ONE OF THREE)

"Memory lane" is a phrase designed to evoke nostalgia. It presupposes a past which is enjoyable to revisit. This is not necessarily wrong, but it is rather limited in vision. We should picture this particular Memory Lane not as a pleasant, attractive-looking suburban street with sprinklers chuffing, power-mowers droning, and kids being pulled along in red wagons by their dads, but rather as a long walk through Middle Earth. You remember Middle Earth? It's got the Shire and hobbitons, but it's also got Mordor. In other words, if you walk far enough, you'd encounter both the loveliness of nature, quaint and charming villages, and well, a marshy, rocky wasteland inhabited by monsters, riddled with sinister-looking architecture, and whose dominant geographical feature is a volcano that belches poisonous smoke. In other words, there's a lot to reccommend here, and there's a lot which we'd be better off avoiding. But if you're going to explore, you've got to actually explore, and that means spending time with smelly, brutish orcs as well as cuddly, pipe-smoking Hobbits.

It's the same way with our television and movie memories. When I poke around in the past, I can't just stick to what worked. Sometimes I have to examine what did not. And sometimes, as in the case that follows, I have to do both. And when I talk about "V," it's necessary for me to clarify what the hell I'm actually talking about. In this case it is not one but three things:

"V" - the two part miniseries (1983)
"V: The Final Battle" - the three part miniseries which followed (1984)
"V: The Series" - the weekly television show which ran from 1984 - 1985

"V" is such a colossal subject to tackle, such a long journey to make, that I must break it up into three separate stages. During those legs of our trip, we will encounter a lot which is good, a lot which is depressingly relevant to today's political situation worldwide, and a great deal which is just trash. The whole of the expedition, however, is necessary, as you will soon discover.

Our fist steps take us to the original miniseries. I was around ten or eleven years old when "V" debuted, and as with a few other cultural phenomena of the time, you really had to be there to appreciate just how big an impact "V" had on television. The 1980s were both the peak and the beginning of the end of the golden age of big-budget TV movies: by the end of the decade, cable TV began to cut deeply into their ratings, and they began to disappear from the cultural map. In 1983, however, they still occupied dizzying heights, and "V" had all the halmarks: a big budget, a huge cast, lavish costumes, the best special effects possible, and a simple yet ambitious story.

"V" is the story of an alien but human-appearing race, dubbed The Visitors, who suddenly appear in the skies over Earth in dozens of enormous spacecraft. The Visitors proclaim friendship and promise to cure Earth of its ills with their superior technology, asking in exchange only some raw materials they require to restore their dying homeworld. A few humans are suspicious, but the Visitors seem sincere, deliver on some of their early promises, and quickly co-opt various journalists, politicians, police officials, and industrialists to their cause. At the same time, however, they begin to orchestrate, through their human puppets, a campaign against the scientific community on earth: some scientists simply disappear, others are forced out of their jobs, all of them are subject to harassment and intimidation. The Visitors also try to secure the loyalty of human youth by empowering the more weaker and more pliable sorts, who are rapidly corrupted by this power and become their willing tools. Soon they have become the de facto government of Earth, all the while proclaiming their friendship. An intrepid journlist eventually discovers the Visitors' human appearance is a sham: beneath realistic skin suits they are carniverous reptilian monsters, and have come to Earth to suck its natural resources dry, enslave some of the population, and, well, eat the rest. This journalist also discovers a few of the Visitors detest what their race is doing and work against the unseen "Leader" as a Fifth Column, an underground resistance movement. Eventually, a human resistance movement arises too, led by a refugee scientist and composed of people from all races and walks of life as well as a renegade Visitor, and begins the seemingly hopeless task of trying to overthrow the Visitors and their human collaborators and save the Earth.

"V" had a positively massive cast, too large for me to break down here. The principal heroes were Mike Donovan (Marc Singer), a two-fisted news cameraman who suspects the Visitors from the beginning, Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant), a scientist who becomes the leader of a human resistance movement, and Willie (Robert Englund), a kindly Visitor who befriends the humans. The principal villains were John (Richard Herd), the Visitor's Supreme Commander, Diana (Jane Badler), a sadistic, scheming Visitor scientist meant to reflect Joseph Mengele and other Nazi war criminals; and Stephen (Andrew Prine), the suave, pitiless Visitor security chief. (There were however several characters meant to serve as archetypes which we will examine later.)

This was the original "V" in a nutshell. It comes off as more or less typical science fiction of the 1950s type, with its flying saucers and malevolent aliens, and it is also a rather impressive examination of the moral and psychological difficulties presented by joining a resistance movement, but there is an enormous distinction which helps elevate the series from mere entertainment into something which is -- sadly -- more relevant in 2024 than it was in 1983. "V" was an unsubtle but at the same time, surprisingly nuanced, allegory about fascism. Specifically, it explored how fascism subverts and destroys democracy, but it also examines, quite fearlessly, the appeal of fascism to the broad masses. Let us tackle this last point in order.

In "V," the Visitors arrive with an impressive display of power -- fifty gigantic motherships, each of which is the size of a major city and presumably holds a corresponding number of "people." Having dazzled Earth with their arrival, they proceed to make a series of promises which seem too good to be true, because they are; nevertheless, most people fall for them. And those who receive the Visitors warmly are in fact rewarded, while those who express suspicion or opposition either disappear without explanation, are "converted" through a form of mind-control torture, or are subject to every form of harassment, forcing them into an underground existence. An entire class of people who could see through the Vistors' facade, scientists, are essentially dehumanized through a propaganda campaign carried out by a co-opted media, and presented as traitors to their own planet: those who do not go into hiding are ultimately killed. The unveiled reference to the Jews of Germany during Hitler's reign is too grossly obvious to mention, but the parallel way it is explored -- more on this in a moment -- is very effective. "V" warns us that fascism is a bait and switch, a fatal game of three card Monte, in which a malevolant magician first hypnotizes us, then picks our pockets, and then, if necessary, beats us into complete submission or simply kills us to get his way. Because by the time many humans have woken up to the threat of the alien magicians, it is too late: the military has been disbanded, police agencies have been co-opted, many brainwashed young people have become willing informers for the aliens, and Visitor troops are everywhere. Those who toe the line live priviliged lives and retain some power, while everyone else is simply used as slave labor or herded onto shuttles for one-way trips to a mothership. A great deal of the Visitors' plan rests upon the idea that corrupted humans will do a certain amount of the dirty work themselves, and they are not wrong in this belief. Three characters in particular epitomize "the collaborators" -- Daniel Bernstein (David Packer), Christine Walsh (Neva Patterson) and Eleanor Dupres (Jenny Sullivan).

Daniel who hails from a Jewish family whose patriarch is a Holocaust survivor, is presented as weak, immature, irresponsible and socially awkward teenager who is seduced by the Visitors to serve as a "youth leader," and is rapidly corrupted almost to the point of insanity by the power he possesses; power he uses to bully and humiliate others. Daniel has brief flashes of conscience after essentially destroying his own family, but always leans toward evil in the end: every time his Visitor mentor sees him weakening, he simply offers him more power, and Daniel always accepts.

Christine is an ambitious reporter who eventually becomes the Visitors' spokesperson on Earth -- in essence, she trades her journalistic integrity for influence, shilling shamelessly for the Visitors even when her ex-boyfriend, a member of the resistance, tries to reveal to her their true nature. Christine sells out completely for a time; she differs from Daniel, however, in that it is more naivete than ambition that corrupt her, and perhaps because of this, in the end she sacrifices her life to help expose the Visitors for what they are.

Eleanor is Mike Donovan's icily ambitious mother, the wife of a wealthy industrialist who sees the Visitors as a means to expand her own fortune and personal power. Beguiled by Stephen, the Visitor overlord who is eventually responsible for some of the worst atrocities the Visitors commit against humanity, she never has a single qualm about climbing into bed with them, and is willing to sacrifice both her marriage and her son's life to further increase her position.

By giving us these characters, "V" allows us to see the appeal of fascism is universal, and different people can arrive at that dark destination by very different routes. The character of Daniel, ably portrayed by Packer as both disgusting and pitiful, is to me is a hallmark of series creator Kenneth Johnson's genius. Making the principal sell-out Jewish, and not merely Jewish but the grandson of a Holocaust survivor who sees all too clearly what is happening, lifts the story from a mere allegory of Nazism to a much larger examination of why fascism (whatever it calls itself) can appeal to anyone, of any ethnicity or race. Daniel is not inherently evil. He's just an unhappy, lazy, weak-minded teenager with well-meaning but ineffectual parents and an unrequited crush on his neighbor's daughter, who rightly feels unseen and powerless; in other words, he's a typical discontented, slightly spoiled suburban high school kid. The Visitors offer him power, the first he has ever known in his life, and he immediately becomes drunk with it, and though he becomes a true monster, he is never beyond our understanding.

"V" also gives us two Visitor characters, the afformentioned Willie, and Martin (Frank Ashmore) who embody the idea that conscience is and always has been the enemy of fascism. The hapless Willie is ultimately too kind-hearted to serve in the Visitor army, falls in love with a human girl, and joins the human resistance. The tougher, more capable Martin, a Visitor security officer, is actually a leader of an antifascist resistance movement within the Visitor race, and joins hands with his human counterparts in hopes of liberating his own people from the tyrannny of their unseen "Leader." At one point, Martin gives Donovan a brief lecture on how lucky humans are to live among such abundance as Earth provides: he is referring to natural resources, but the message is plain -- enjoy your freedom, kid, because it may be gone tomorrow. In a show which was often incredibly heavy-handed, and could have portrayed all the Visitors as cartoonish monsters, it was refreshing to see this sort of nuance.

It is true that "V" suffered from all the stigmata of most 80s television shows. The weight of the allegory can be crushing at times. There are logic problems and plot holes that were obvious to me even as a ten year old boy. The Visitors, considering their advanced technology, are startlingly incompetent whenever the script requires them to be. The co-hero, Mike Donovan, though portrayed engagingly by Marc Singer, is a Mary Sue of the first caliber, and becomes more of one as the "V" universe progresses (in contrast, Grant's Juliet Parrish undergoes much more realistic struggles of conscience and confidence as she unwillingly evolves into a guerilla leader). In the end however, none of this really matters, because the essence of "V" is timeless. It is a warning, not about the danger of first contact with aliens, but about what we, human beings, are capable of doing to each other. It is a lesson about the fragility of democracy and decency, the tragic necessity of remaining permanently on guard against those who arrive with brass bands and flags a-flyin', offering us easy solutions to complex problems if only we'll part with a little...just a little...of our decency and personal freedom. In today's age, when certain American politicians are more or less openly employing the tactics of the Visitors to the adoring applause of their followers, it is a lesson we could stand to learn once more.